Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 13 2009 (IPS) – A growing new market for human organs has prompted the United Nations and the Council of Europe to call for an international convention to regulate the sale of body parts, mostly kidneys and livers, in transplant surgery worldwide.

Arthur Caplan, director of the Centre for Bioethics at the University o…

Dahr Jamail

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Nov 16 2009 (IPS) – According to a soldiers advocacy group at Fort Hood, the U.S. base where an army psychiatrist has been charged with killing 13 people and wounding 30 in a Nov. 5 rampage, the official suicide figures provided by the Army are definitely too low.
Chuck Luther served 12 years in the military and is a veteran of two deployments to Iraq, where he was a reconnaissance scout in the 1st Cavalry Division. The former sergeant was based at Fort Hood, where he lives today.

I see the ugly, Luther told IPS. I see soldiers beating their wives and trying to kill themselves all the time, and most folks don t want to look at this, including the military.

Luther, who in 2007 became the founder and director of the Soldier s Adv…

Valeria Fernández

PHOENIX, Arizona, Dec 4 2009 (IPS) – Arizona community activists and religious leaders are trying to mitigate fears over a new law that would require state employees to denounce undocumented immigrants.

Lydia Guzmán, president of the pro-immigrant coalition Somos America, speaks with the local Spanish TV …

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 17 2010 (IPS) – The sun had barely set and already, the residents of Rue Berne were making their beds. These bedrooms were makeshifts arranged neatly on one side of the street, away from shaky walls and fragile home frames that remain so dangerous.

A man sets up a shelter in Cité Soleil, Haiti. Credit: UN Photo/Logan Abassi

The men erected barricades, leaving enough room for a vehicle to navigate the tiny canyon. Soon they shared whatever they had pasta, or rice with smoked herring. …

Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Feb 22 2010 (IPS) – The mighty mountains of hazardous electronic waste are growing by about 40 million tonnes a year globally. In China, India and South Africa, those mountains are expected to grow 200 to 500 percent in the next decade, a new report warns.

Informal e-waste recycling in China. Credit: StEP-EMPA

And that s just from domestic sales of TVs, computers and cell phones. The figure doesn t include millions of tonnes of e-waste that is exported, mostly illegally, into these countries.

Sales of electronic consumer…

Fabiana Frayssinet

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 31 2010 (IPS) – Experts from around the world are trying to attract attention to deadly but little-known illnesses, such as Chagas disease, visceral leishmaniasis and sleeping sickness, that have been neglected by the pharmaceutical industry.
So-called neglected tropical diseases, which also include malaria, dengue fever and schistosomiasis, in conjunction with tuberculosis are responsible for 11.4 percent of the global burden of illness, but only 1.3 percent of the 1,556 new drugs registered between 1975 and 2004 were specifically developed for these diseases.

Pharmaceutical laboratories give these diseases zero priority, Tania Araújo-Jorge, head of the state Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ), told IPS.

The Brazilian Fo…

Kit Gillet

BEIJING, Apr 29 2010 (IPS) – China s lifting of its longstanding ban on foreign visitors with HIV removes a restriction that many Chinese doctors and activists find discriminatory, but erasing the stigma attached with the virus remains one of the biggest challenges ahead in facing the disease.
The lifting of the ban was announced on Apr. 27, one month after the country refused entry to Australian author Robert Dessaix, who had included his HIV- positive status on a visa application to China.

A statement released by the Chinese State Council on Tuesday said that, after careful research, government officials had concluded that the ban had an extremely limited effect on preventing and controlling the pandemic within the country. Officials also said that the ba…

BANGKOK, Jun 9 2010 (IPS) – She spends so much time immersed in water that she may soon turn into a mermaid. But Jariya Sakayaroj looks like she does not mind even if she ends up developing scales.

Microbiologist Jariya Sakayaroj explores the waters for fungi that may contain bioactive compounds that could be used for medical treatm…

Fabiana Frayssinet

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 9 2010 (IPS) – The Statute of Racial Equality, soon to be signed into law in Brazil, is at the centre of a controversy between those who consider it a historical achievement, like the abolition of slavery in 1888, and those who see it as failing to satisfy the demands of the black movement.
The ceremony at which Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will sign the statute into law, scheduled for Jul. 20, will not be the brilliant occasion hoped for by the government s Special Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality (SEPPIR).

After nearly two decades of debate, the statute approved by Congress on Jun. 16 has not left everyone happy.

It is a watered-down text that does not include some of the major demands …

Susan Anyangu-Amu

NAIROBI, Aug 3 2010 (IPS) – An arrow points the way from a busy street along a rough pathway; visitors clutch their bags more closely. The door is open: sachets are displayed on the table with labels indicating treatment for ulcers, diabetes, hypertension, fibroids. But not the contraceptive pill IPS is looking for.
Thirty-five-year-old Sophie she didn t want her surname used came here for six months for a herbal contraceptive.

She says she gained a lot of weight and suffered severe bleeding in connection with the injectable contraceptive she was getting at a government health facility, so she turned to this alternative, oblivious to official warnings that it has been linked to serious health problems.

I stopped using conventional family pla…